November 04, 2013

To me, the greatest joy of hunting is walking down some trail, or Forest Service road that isn't really a road by anyone else's standard, and feeling the modern world fade away with each footstep. Not that I hate modernity itself, I'm no Luddite by any means, but the way the modern world works these days, especially here in America, makes me despair sometimes. The first three weeks of October were particularly soul-sucking in exposing the debased and incompetent nature of our so-called elites. Three solid days of walking in the woods at the end of October could not have come at a better time. So with a little refreshed perspective from that, a few thoughts on Obamacare.

Of all of the lies around Obamacare, the website failure is the smallest and most fixable. We were once again sold the fable that the federal bureaucracy has the competence to get something right the first time. It doesn't. It never has and it never will. Even the most admired bureaucracy in the federal government, the US military, initially fucks things up all the time. The Obamacare website will eventually be fixed to an acceptable standard by the same method the federal bureaucracies always use─the combined brute force of lots of money and manpower.

The first really big lie that has been exposed is Obama's(and the entire Democratic Party's) claim that if you like your plan or your doctor you will be able to keep them. Not only did they know that wasn't going to be true for millions of individual plans, they spent the last three years tightening the regulatory screws that would make it a certainty for millions more. Additional coverage mandated by Obamacare have made those plans illegal and the replacement plans are naturally more expensive.

In addition, many insurers are controlling the cost to consumers by cutting down the number of in-network providers in their lower cost plans. Millions of Americans are discovering they can only keep their doctor if they switch insurers, which may not be practical if they are in a group plan, or if they upgrade their coverage. And if you think it's fun now, wait until the employer mandate fully kicks in and we see what other consequences make themselves known.

Nothing exposes Obama's unprincipled and arrogant nature more than his attempt to blame insurers for all of this. That's a lie, pure and simple. And nothing is more infuriating than his craven apologists who have commandeered for themselves the right to determine what is or is not the right minimal health care coverage for everybody else.

The biggest lie of all is not yet obvious to many Americans, though it should be. That's the idea that the government, through a maze of mandates, subsidies, cost-shifting, and dozens of panels of experts, can effectively manage the US health care system at all. We've been doing that stuff to one extent or another for decades now at the state and federal level and it's why the health care system is as screwed up as it is today. Now we're going to do all that stuff on steroids and the result will be...awesome?

No, it's going to be a disaster of perverse incentives and completely predictable unintended consequences leading to "fix," after "fix," after "fix" until it becomes obvious even to Democrats that this was the dumbest government intervention in the history of the United States. And I haven't even touched on the crushing economic effects that are just starting to be felt.

June 12, 2013

Some thoughts on the NSA controversy after a week of wading through charges, denials, counter-charges, and spin.

When the Russians and the Germans suggest that you should dial back on the secret police shit, you should probably listen. Okay, that's not entirely fair, but you have to roll with the awesome irony.

Good news! House Democrat Loretta Sanchez, speaking after a briefing to House members from the NSA today, declared that she learned the extent of the domestic surveillance program "is significantly more than what is out in the media today." I can hardly wait.

We are told that there are checks and balances in how all of that data about us can be accessed, so we are protected from it being used for political or personal gains or attacks. For example, in the last few years the FISA court appears to have actually denied one of the thousands of requests.

Setting sarcasm aside for a moment, I have no doubt that what has been revealed so far, and probably what has not, has actually been done within the law. The problem I see is that the applicable Constitutional boundaries of the law were defined back in 1979, when the Digital Age was still in its infancy. We give all sorts of data records to companies, not just related to phone calls, that the US Supreme Court couldn't even imagine 34 years ago. If nothing else, the revelations around the scope and scale of NSA domestic data collection reinforce that we urgently need to have a debate about governmental violations of personal privacy, and we should throw in the now common corporate violations as well.

I have three long posts that I started and then haven't finished on this topic. Partly because new information overtook them and partially because it's a complicated subject that gets pretty deep if given any kind of thoughtful treatment. I lean against domestic data gathering such as this, but it's value in potentially preventing terrorist attacks can't be denied. Is it worth the damage to privacy and the dangerous risk of abuse? I don't think so, but that's another post.